Photo credit: Mark R Mariucci
BretteBlomme
Brett Blomme fell in love with Milwaukee while an undergraduate at Marquette University. After graduation, he worked for the LBGT Community Center and Fair Wisconsin, then returned to his home state of Missouri for a law degree and then back to Milwaukee to work as a prosecutor and criminal defense attorney. He raised funds for the AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin but wanted “a deeper relationship with the community and an opportunity to tackle the big issues facing LGBTQ+ folks today.” So a year ago this week, he accepted the position of president and CEO of the Cream City Foundation.
What do you see as our big issues?
After marriage equality in 2015, a historic day for LGBTQ+ folks, I think the community was left with the question, what’s next? As a foundation, we partnered with researchers from Marquette to conduct a strategic needs assessment. We interviewed 27 organizations across Wisconsin, looking to find what they viewed as the greatest needs facing the community, and we found three emerging elevated priority areas: health, equity and prosperity.
Explain, please.
With health, we’re talking about access to health care and health insurance, about finding welcoming and culturally competent health care providers who feel adequate to respond to the needs of the LBGTQ+ community. With equity, we’re talking about a better understanding that our community is not monolithic but many different communities with different needs, different intersecting identities, experiences and oppressions. And prosperity means creating opportunities for our families and our individuals to earn livings and have access to healthy food and housing. So really, a lot of the issues that face the general community but they’re just more complicated when you lay your gender identity, your sexual orientation, on top of that.
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So what’s the work today?
We’ve taken those three elevated priorities and laid them over our program work. We have a grantmaking program, an LGBTQ scholarship program and our convening program. Grantmaking is just that: We invite organizations to apply for funds specifically directed at issues of health, equity and prosperity in our community. And we’re in our third year of the scholarship program. After this year, we’ll have given out over $100,000 in scholarships.
To help kids go to school?
Exactly. That’s a program we’re very proud of and it continues to expand. This year we’re adding a requirement that our students also participate in a mentorship program through the LGBT Chamber of Commerce, to provide them opportunities to network, to have that connection to a business or to the arts community—somebody in their field of study so they have someone to go to when they’re looking for a job because we want to keep good people here in Milwaukee.
And what is “convening?”
I really view it as the cornerstone of our mission. We bring people together around the table to talk about these issues and try to move our community forward in big, bold ways. We bring together LGBTQ service organizations and allied service organizations. And that stems right into our grantmaking program. If you want to apply, we require that you partner with an LGBTQ organization and an allied organization because the research tells us those partnerships get bigger, bolder results.
What does this job mean to you?
I truly believe that philanthropy can change communities. The research tells us that the LGBTQ community around the country is at a severe disadvantage when it comes to dollars invested in the community. So I have a role in helping to close that disparity. The concept that started the Foundation back in the early ’80s, when the community came together to respond to the AIDS epidemic, is that my thousand dollars and your thousand dollars pooled together will make a bigger statement and have a bigger impact. We’re a more powerful voice for the community when we work together.
How can we help?
Our Summer Social is Tuesday, July 24, at 6 p.m. at the South Shore Terrace and Beer Garden. It helps us raise critical funds. Our Business Equality Luncheon comes up in October. We award our scholarships there and also celebrate those corporations that are proactively trying to make their workplaces more inclusive and welcoming for our LGBTQ community members. This year, Southwest Airlines’ senior vice president of diversity and inclusion will be our keynote speaker. She can talk about three decades of changes. I hope the corporate community and the LGBTQ community will come and participate in that.
For more information visit creamcityfoundation.org.
